


Antimeridian

by Tlon



Category: Wolverine (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Internal Monologue, Torture, skin is so strange when you think about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 06:45:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10431483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: The sun is merciless in its simplicity. Transigen is merciless in its complications. Caliban knows neither one is a winning battle, but that doesn't mean he won't fight them to the end for Logan and Charles.OR a canon-ish account of the bits of Caliban's arc we didn't see inLogan.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I do not know how Caliban is not more of a thing here. So I will contribute the only way I know how: with angst and allusions.

There's a purity to the border sun that even a man who would die of it, a man like Caliban, can admire. It makes decisions simple: siestas in the hottest hours, outdoor work under the stars, the only time it is safe to go outside. There are few things to do in between, most days. Cook and clean. Bear out the choking eternities of Charles' seizures. Watch Logan pretend he isn't dying. Wait.

Today is different. Today he is driving into the desert trying to ignore the rattle of a pistol on the dashboard, and trying not to think about what will happen if the man in the backseat wakes up.

If everything hadn't gone to hell so quickly, he would never be alone with a Transigen mercenary, unconscious or not. Logan acts sometimes as though other people are immortal weapons like he once was. Or maybe he simply doesn't take the company seriously enough. There's no time to think about that now. All Caliban needs to do is dump Donald Pierce and come back, and then they can face a hundred uglier and less tractable problems, starting with this new mutant Charles has decided will save them all. Simple.

It would be simpler if he didn't have to keep pulling the mask around his face and making sure his gloves don't slip as he wrestles with Pierce's limp form. Pierce flops to the ground like a badly stuffed pillow, perfect hair feathering around his face; even with his eyes closed, he sneers. He must have been hit hard for him to still be out like this, Caliban thinks. People don't simply sleep through being dragged through the dirt in midday. Pierce won't burn like he would, but Caliban arranges him in the shade, just out of sympathy.

As he returns to shut the door, it occurs to him that perhaps the man was a little too insensate, too compliant. He turns back, only to have the air turn to ash in his lungs as Pierce holds the gun to his head.

If he lives, he will never let Logan hear the end of this.

***

Logan and Charles and the girl are long gone by the time Pierce lets him out of the stifling car and orders him to track them – like old times, he might as well say. _Beware the light_ , Pierce drawls, toying with his knife. _Bet that's the first thing your mother told you._ Of course it wasn't, Caliban could snap. It's a daft Hammer Horror line his mother would have hated, when she had avoided even naming his condition, as though that would make it any less apparent or his father less appalled.

Pierce doesn't need to know any of this; all he needs to know is that Transigen will never use Caliban again. Or at least, that's the noble sentiment. It lasts a glorious few seconds, until Pierce slashes the cord to the canopy above them and forces Caliban's face into the searing light. Pierce lets him scream himself hoarse, holding him in place with contemptuous amusement, and Caliban wishes he could make him understand what it's like to feel his own skin roasting. At long last he's allowed to collapse back into the darkness, defeated. For the moment, he promises himself. Only the moment.

They drop him at a table with a map and pencil, and Pierce sits across from him, grinning behind his dark glasses. There's a strip of sun dividing them, illuminating the spiderweb of highway lines.

“They're north,” Caliban tells him. “Not too far along.”

Pierce's smile stretches. “North?” he says slowly. “North. The people we think are supposed to be driving to Canada are headed _north_. Well, I'll say, bloodhound... that's really fucking helpful.”

“You think Logan's the only one who's not what he used to be?” Caliban says, trying to keep his voice steady.

Pierce leans forward. “If you say so.” His mechanical fingers glide along Caliban's knuckles, down to his wrist. He pushes his sleeve up and yanks his arm across the table, pinning it beneath the light.

It is fascinatingly horrible. His arm thrashes, fishlike. But Pierce is too strong, and Caliban can only watch as a red line blooms across it.

“Let's try again,” Pierce tells him. “Start with a direction. Which direction are they? You're gonna want to be exact.”

The slash on his arm is darkening, blisters rising and tightening. Caliban doesn't scream this time, but he trembles in pain and tries to look away. Pierce grabs his face.

“How much longer you think till the nerve damage is irreparable?” he asks, drawing out the syllables: _ir-rep-par-a-ble_. “And the way I see it, you've got a lot more arm to try this on.”

It's so easy, too easy, to point out their direction. Three entities somewhere past Pierce, receding. Two with the aching familiarity that he develops after tracking someone long enough, although it's difficult to distinguish between Logan and Charles while they're so close together. On an ordinary day Charles is a steady presence in the back of his consciousness, always close at hand, while Logan stretches and rebounds with every limousine call. He would never tell Logan that he senses his movements almost instinctively now – he knows Logan finds it unsettling enough that his two remaining human contacts (human-ish, anyhow) can keep such close track of, respectively, his body and his mind.

Caliban looks at Pierce pleadingly, but the grip on his arm doesn't loosen. Pierce draws a straight-edged compass out of his pocket and slides it across the map. “Now, that's good intel,” he says. “We're just gonna match it with a little orienteering – want to draw us a line?” He jerks his head at the Reaver next to him, who obliges. “So we've got a trajectory, but no distance. You got something a little more precise?”

Looking at his charring arm makes Caliban sick, but the pain has receded. _Irreparable_ , he thinks. Then Pierce pulls a new section into the light, and it flares again. “You try maths under torture,” Caliban gasps.

Pierce laughs. “Well, what a delicate creature _you_ are,” he says. “You got thirty seconds.”

As he draws his arm back, Caliban glances down, trying not to let Pierce or the Reavers see that he's looking at the map. Their quarry must be well into Texas, but they won't know how far.

“Figure you might be thinking of making something up right now,” Pierce murmurs to him. “Well, I figure, you know, you don't need all the limbs you got. Or all the eyes.”

Caliban knows too much to take it as an empty threat. The Reavers match the old cartels in businesslike atrocity, and behind his angel face, Pierce is something even worse. But Caliban can't stand the thought of playing Judas again, not to the last of his kind. He meets Pierce's eyes and whispers a number that's short by miles. At the very least, it might buy them time.

Pierce looks at him a little too long. Then he rises and slaps him on the back, knocking him to the edge of the light. “Good man,” he tells him. “Knew you were up for it. Now come on.”

“What?” Caliban asks, although he thinks he already knows.

“Get up,” says Pierce. “We got a long ride.”

They leave his protective clothes behind, tossing him a blanket for cover. The hot air between its fabric and his skin makes him feel even more vulnerable than the Reaver who runs a hand up his neck once they enter the safely dim confines of a van. “Not so bad for a freak,” he mutters, leaning close. When a finger slides near Caliban's lips he bites at it, earning a fist in his stomach and a kick in the ribs when he falls. “Still a freak, though,” the man spits. He shuts the door to the cage and leaves.

A cage. It smells of petrol and gunpowder, and he imagines that it's meant to keep people out, not lock them in. But it holds him just as well, and the whole van is a prison, at least in daylight. He braces himself as it hums alive, favoring his face and arm when a pothole knocks him against its metal wall. Soon the air thickens with exhaust and he knows that they must be near civilization again, maybe at the border. Logan would know these roads, but Caliban has only taken them once, on the first drive down to Charles.

How many others did he help put into cages like this, working with Transigen? It's a question he rarely thinks about, and not only out of denial. He worries that if it reaches the forefront of his mind then Charles will inadvertently find the thread and tug at it, and if there's even the slightest chance he doesn't already know what Caliban has done, Caliban would like to keep it that way.

Not that he thought about it much back then, either. Transigen's lies about protective custody and registration had been nonsense, of course. But some days he could fool himself into believing them. After a lifetime in the shadows he deserved for once to be safe, to be lucky, he had told himself. If he left they would twist someone else's power for the same purpose, and that person would hunt him down just like the rest.

Was that true? He's not sure, now that he can examine the thought at a distance. In his present situation, it certainly isn't. It doesn't matter. He refuses to believe his suffering is a kind of justice – none of them deserved this, not even him.

Eventually he settles into the rhythm of travel and closes his eyes, distracting himself from the pain by focusing on Logan and Charles' presences. He's almost managed to convince himself he's back home by the time the van stops. He's nearly done it again by the time Pierce finally opens the door.

“Good news for you,” Pierce says, taking a seat next to him. He's got the knife back out, trying to roll it between his fingers like a bad coin trick. “Our little monster decided she wanted a snack, and true to form, she made a whole lot of mess going about it. So at least we know you weren't lying.”

There's barely time for Caliban to realize what's happening when Pierce holds his palm to the floor and jams the knife halfway under one nail, casual as a handshake.

“You said – you said I wasn't lying,” he manages.

“That I did,” says Pierce. “But we didn't find them, either. Effort's well and good, but we're a commercial enterprise. We like results.”

Hours later, his injured finger pressed into a clenched fist, Caliban lets himself believe he's fooled them.

***

The girl doesn't show herself that obviously again. But the slow route Caliban suggests is plausible enough that Pierce seems to accept it. Caliban counts the time in small injuries: more burns, bruises, and cuts, delivered with an affable reminder of how much worse they could be.

This must be a little like how Logan feels, with his collection of wounds that never heal. Sharp hurt is a singular event, even if it's agony – something Caliban is well acquainted with, now. The hell is in the aftermath. It's in every hour of wondering how long the pain will last, and praying that infection won't set in and make it worse. It's in keeping a perpetual wall between his mind and his damaged body, long after the adrenalin that helped him stand Pierce's first bout of torture has drained.

He has to stay conscious, because he needs to plot exactly where Logan and Charles are going, so he can direct the Reavers to where they've already been. It feels dangerously good to use his old skills again, after so long fumbling through the role of a hospice nurse. He wonders if this, too, is how Logan feels when he kills. The thought is abhorrent, but hasn't Caliban killed too, if only through proxy? Charles is the only one of them that can claim innocence, and even he has blood on his hands. As if the world is dedicated to proving some cruel Darwinian principle of survival: the unnatural, red in tooth and claw.

Caliban has no claws, though. There will be no defense, no escape plan, if Pierce figures out he's holding back.

It comes sooner than he thinks.

When his beacons stop, Caliban tries to stall until they keep moving again. But the Reavers ignore him, driving until the three of them are so close he can sense them separately. The men around him seem to be waiting for something, as though holding their breath in anticipation. Then the shock hits, and none of them can breathe at all.

The seizure takes seconds that feel like years, but once it's over he thinks he would prefer it to Pierce's gold-pocked smile.

“You didn't think you were our only intel source, did you?” he asks, and Caliban says nothing, because of course he did.

“So we get a tip that conflicts with your most helpful directions, and, well, I've got a lot of dead boys now that prove it out. And you've got trouble coming.”

The tooth, that's all he's going to think about – that whatever Pierce decides to do he will always be the man with that stupid, affected gold tooth in a time of perfect dental work. Then Pierce tells him precisely what he's going to do, in stomach-turning detail.

“But don't worry,” he says. “You'll stay just alive enough to give us some real coordinates.”

Pierce says he'll be back. This time when the van lurches Caliban barely notices it; panic has driven the pain from his body. _They got away,_ he whispers to himself. _They got away._ If he says it enough times, maybe he'll remember it when... he can't think about that. Finally exhaustion overcomes him, and he sleeps.

When he wakes to the sound of a door, Pierce isn't the one who's opened it. The man who did would look unremarkable to a stranger: a hard-faced middle-aged office sort with more forehead than hair. Caliban looks at him blearily, hoping he's seeing wrong. But there's no mistaking the voice, with its chilly, vacant _reasonableness_. Zander Rice could talk a man into the middle of a motorway and chat with him until the cars bore down.

_Resistant_ , Rice calls him, as though he's a patient refusing medicine. Caliban can't stop the anger from slipping into his voice as he lies about holding back. He hates being spoken to like they're still working together, after he gave up so much to leave. Hates that Transigen can get him back so easily, hates the constant fear. Hates Rice with all his soulless level-headed persuasion. How the man speaks as if taking Charles into custody is altruistic.

Until the mask drops and Rice looks him up and down, eyes lingering at the burns on his face. He must look like hell, Caliban thinks, even more than people usually believe he does.

“Donald told me what he had planned, you know,” Rice says. “I told him you would understand our point of view. If not... how long do you really think you can last? How long before you break?”

He fixes Caliban with his pale eyes. “You're not a warrior, Caliban. You're not a samurai. You're a man who has a choice. You can help us get back the child. Or you can gamble on your own resilience, and risk losing her and the people you... care about.”

Rice's last words are almost lascivious. Maybe he thinks Logan and Caliban are lovers. As though they ever could be – they need each other far too much. Not to say Caliban has never imagined it, or wondered if Logan has too. But anything that could upset their precarious relationship is a dangerous luxury.

In everything else, though, Rice is right.

In a heretical gospel, Caliban thinks, Judas' betrayal isn't his decision – it's ordained by forces more powerful than him.

Caliban gives them up.

“Thank you,” says Rice calmly. “I'll give Donald your regards.”

He shuts the door behind him quietly. For the first time in the whole ordeal, Caliban weeps.

He feels like one of the scorpion husks that accumulate and wither after Charles' fits, frail and hollow and rotten inside. Charles is closer by the minute, and so are the rest of them. They aren't moving; maybe they think they're safe. When none of them ever have been – not him nor Logan nor any of the others who died years ago. The best they can hope for are a few months or years of quiet companionship. That, at least, Caliban can say he's had.

It's dark when the Reavers stop. There is a _thing_ outside, a thing that could be Logan but isn't, snarling for blood. The men in the van with Caliban now reek of fear; even Pierce grips his gun convulsively beneath his stock confident grin.

Strangely, Caliban finds that he doesn't share the feeling. There's nothing in him for fear to take hold of, only a sort of impregnable resignation. Rice has lied again, just well enough for Caliban to let himself believe that he could keep his companions safe. But now the lie is up, the Reavers all ignore him, and no one bothers to look as he slips a hand outside the cage towards their loose gear, their weapons. They don't seem to realize that whatever he finds, he has nothing to lose.

He hopes Logan and Charles get their Sunseeker after all of this is done. Caliban doesn't think any further, because it's the kindest end he can imagine for their story – after that there are _only_ endings, and sharp or slow, they wind up the same place. Caliban has never expected happy endings. But if there's anything close to one for him, it might be the conviction that he's given the rest of them something better.

The daylight might break him, but the night is his.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure precisely how film!Caliban's powers are supposed to work, and what I scrounged from wikis on his comics appearances didn't seem to make sense somewhere as big as the film's setting, so I went with the first idea that seemed a little plausible and gave me props to work with. Literature!


End file.
